As with previous releases, PowerDirector 13 provides everything you need to create professional videos, complete with soundtrack, transitions, special effects and more, before exporting your project to a file, sharing it online, or burning it to disc, complete with your own custom menus.

New additions include custom Transition and Titles designers, H.265/HEVC, 2K/4K and XAVC-S import/ export support, better image stabilisation, a more powerful menu designer, and new support for automatically synchronising up to 100 camera clips on the timeline.

The suite also includes PhotoDirector 6, a powerful tool for transforming regular images into polished, professional photos.

This now includes a panorama creator, intelligently stitching together multiple images to spectacular effect.

A quirky Face Swap feature automatically picks the best faces (biggest smiles, clearest eyes) from multiple group shots and merges them into one. Unsurprisingly, the end results vary considerably in quality, but it's fun to try.

More conventionally, there's a new Skin Tone tool, a Radial filter and Grain effect, along with 36 new lens profiles for even better image correction.

New integration with CyberLink Cloud means you're able to back up your projects or source materials to 20GB of free (for 1 year) online storage space and access them from anywhere.

The suite also includes ColorDirector, a professional colour correction tool which uses advanced motion tracking to help enhance, correct and adjust the colour temperature and intensity of your videos.

Finally, AudioDirector is a capable and very complete sound designer which can apply special effects to your soundtrack, repair audio problems, record custom audio, mix tracks and more.

Verdict:

Director Suite is a significant release, combining the best of CyberLink's video and photo editing technology within a money-saving bundle.

There's a vast amount to learn, of course, and that's even before you start building your game. But there's plenty of documentation, tutorials, demos and sample projects to point you in the right direction.

The package is now entirely free, too - no annoying limitations, nag screens or anything else. Epic now only requires that you pay a 5% royalty after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. And even then, you "pay no royalty for film projects, contracting and consulting projects such as architecture, simulation and visualization."

8.48 brings:
- Optimized grass rendering and procedural foliage system preview
- Plugins available in Marketplace
- Improved accuracy for motion blur
- New Tone Mapper
- Support for all the latest VR hardware including Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Steam VR and HTC Vive, Leap Motion, and Sony's Project Morpheus for PlayStation 4
- "Scrubbable" network replays with rewind support and live time scrubbing
- Visualize the memory footprint of game assets in an interactive tree map UI